Barack Obama: An Agent of Cynicism

Not a lot you haven't read before, but a worthy effort in showing Barack Obama for what he is.

Among other points:

Fifth, President Obama has continually presented himself as trans-ideological, the answer to "worn-out dogmas" and "worn-out ideas" and "stale political arguments." He doesn't subscribe to an "old, discredited philosophy." It is his critics, he insists, who do. It is they who are intellectually rigid, dogmatic, captives of old ways of thinking. Obama is the one who, like Lincoln, will "think anew and act anew."

Except that it is Obama himself who displays rutted thinking. It is he who is championing worn-out dogmas. And it is he who is advancing a deeply ideological agenda. Unlike Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who demonstrated policy creativity and attempted to advance "third way" solutions, President Obama is turning out to be utterly and conventionally liberal, embracing record-breaking spending programs and record-breaking tax increases and giving us a record-breaking deficit and record-breaking debt. Rather than par down his liberal aims in the light of the economic crisis we face, he is enlarging them.

Sixth, Obama has decried "the smallness of our politics -- the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle the big problems of America." He has said to his fellow citizens, "Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long." Yet Obama's White House, led by his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and his most important political adviser, David Axelrod, hostaed a poll-tested plot to target radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. They are promoting what they pretend to lament: phony and foolish diversions, distractions and manipulations, immaturity and pettiness.

There is more. Obama has promised time and again to make "hard decisions," yet he has made almost none. He has talked about the importance of embodying a culture of responsibility, yet he pretends that the omnibus spending bill he signed yesterday was "last year's decision." He says our responsibility to our children is "to ensure that we do not pass on to them a debt they cannot pay" -- yet based on his own budget figures, Obama will add $7 trillion to our debt from 2009 to 2019.

This has led, sooner than anyone could have imagined, to a serious credibility gap.

Oh: And a fresh one, which the writer couldn't include due to its recency.

Barack Obama promising to stop the practice of signing statements.

posted by Ace at 11:44 AM

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